I promised you the interview, here is it. I find this interview especially interesting because it is one of the longer and better earlier ones, because of some statements concerning the creation of the first Pern stories and because of how Anne clearly states that one can just push material that far and has to be careful not to spin a yarn too far, it might break. Very clearly she states that she does not intend to write more than two books in the Crystal Singer setting (yet she did and I found Crystal Line not on the same level of quality of the earlier ones) -- and of course, despite the fact that most of the fans have clamoured for years for more Pern -- we all know writing about Pern was at its hayday several volumes ago (although many of us will grab all we can get for various reasons). Also interesting is what Anne says about Helva and about the time and mood in which that was written, to which I can relate, and about which subject I have spoken with Anne herself on a very personal level. Anyway, without further ado (you'll have to judge for yourselves), here it is:

The month of April 1926 saw two significant science fiction births. It was the month when Hugo Gernsback brought out the first issue of Amazing Stories, the very first magazine devoted to science fiction – an event which marks the appearance of science fiction as a separate and distinct literary genre. It was also the month in which American author Anne McCaffrey was born.

As a girl, Anne McCaffrey gave up writing in favour of opera and the theatre. In the 1950s she tried writing again and had two stories printed in United States magazines. Her first novel, Restoree, was published in 1967, but it was her second book, Dragonflight, published in 1968, which really put her name on the science fiction map.. (Two of its constituent parts won awards: a Hugo for Weyr Search and a Nebula for Dragonrider.) Other dragon novels set on the planet Pern followed at intervals. So far there have been Dragonquest (1971), Dragonsong (1976), Dragonsinger (1977), The White Dragon (1978) and Dragondrums (1979).

She has several other science fiction books published, notably The Ship Who Sang (1969) and To Ride Pegasus (1973), as well as two anthologies and three romances. These days she lives in Ireland (in a house called Dragonhold) and spends most of her spare time raising and training horses.

On the third of April, 1982 she flew over to England for the day to sign copies of her new novel, The Crystal Singer (Severn House, £ 6.95) at Birmingham’s Andromeda Bookshop. After signing her name hundreds of times throughout the afternoon (while simultaneously chatting with some of her many fans) she graciously agreed to be interviewed.

Anne has silver-grey hair, and she was looking extremely elegant in a full-length coast of grey suede. She is a cheerful extrovert, very friendly and forthcoming on the subject of her life and work

SFR: I’d like to start at the beginning by asking how you got into writing science fiction. Did you read it when you were young?

AMC: I read it, but it was not called science fiction then, you know. (Laughs)

SFR: But some of it was…

AMC: Some of it was and is now, but not so much in the thirties when I started reading A. Merritt. In fact, my mother gave me a copy of Argosy magazine with The Ship of Ishtar in it. Now, before that I had been brought up on Kipling – the marvellous Indian stories. So I’d sort of been prepared for science fiction. And I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs for myself. Tarzan and also the John Carter series, which I much preferred. To this day, when I reread Edgar Rice Burroughs, I think of oranges, because as a small child I’d sit on my back porch with a plate of oranges all cut up into sections so that I could eat them while I was reading and go through what was available of the John Carter series.
What I did not realise was that Edgar Rice Burroughs was a war correspondent in the Pacific Ocean at the time I was eating oranges and reading his books. It was with a great sense of shock that I realised later that he had died somewhere in between that point and my recognition of science fiction.

SFR: Which authors have most influenced your own writing?

AMC: Kipling, Austin Tappan Wright…

SFR: Ah, Islandia.

AMC: Yes, Islandia (laughs) I discovered it when I was fourteen. It opened a whole new world. I had been reading some other utopian novels – I also read them for my major in college – but they were just utopian, not science fiction. In the circles in which I moved as a young girl science fiction was not recognised, although my mother had, as I said, loved A. Merritt’s stories. I read most of Merritt when I was in my early teens, as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Anthony Hope’s Rupert of Hentzau and The Prisoner of Zenda. Si I always tended towards that romantic end of fiction.

SFR: You mean you liked the romantic element and you also feel it influenced what you came to write?

AMC: It must have done.

SFR: Do you still find the time to read science fiction by other writers?

AMC: I think you go through periods where you’re searching for different things from science fiction. When I started reading science fiction, knowing it was science fiction, in 1950, I was hungry for science fiction. In the fifties, my god, I couldn’t wait, you know? I was clamouring for it. Where’s the next book? And there wasn’t enough to satisfy my desire. That’s when I started writing it. And then in the sixties science fiction was building. It was being carefully built, let us say, by the Milford Science Fiction Conferences which Damon Knight, Judy Merril and Kate Wilhelm took on. They wanted to improve the product and they succeeded beyond their modest ambitions of the time. I got in in the late fifties, early sixties. Damon Knight always said that science fiction went in twelve-year cycles, and perhaps he’s right. Star Trek gave it a tremendous impetus in the mid-to-late sixties and then the men landing on the Moon in ’69 made another tremendous impact, and people began to think they could take their science fiction books out of the brown paper covers and out of the closets and start reading it in public. Since then it hasn’t looked back.

SFR: Did you go to those early Milford conferences?

AMC: By golly, I did.

SFR: Did you find them useful? Did you learn your craft of writing at them or were you already an established writer when you first went to them?

AMC: Ni, I wasn’t established when I first went to one. I was very pregnant with my daughter, Georgeanne. Judy Merril invited me up to Milford. And I went up, great with child, and met, to my eternal delight, Rosel George Brown and Kate Wilhelm. We were all, shall we say, freshmen at the same time. And you learn by observing, I think, as much as by hearing your stories criticised. I am not a critical writer. I’m not too good in a conference situation myself, because I’m not analytical enough. It was listening to other people had to say that helped me, not so much the criticism of my story. Later I was asked to be chairperson of the English Milford conferences because I was a Hugo and Nebula winner and I was a well-known author. Jim Blish was physically not up to being chairperson, so I was asked to take over, which I did for four years. When I submitted a story which most of the conferees liked, I decided that’s it, I’ll quit while I’m ahead (laughs). Otherwise, most of my stories were ripped into tiny shreds. I must say they were better for dissection, because out of them came such things as To Ride Pegasus and Crystal Singer. And some of my other good ideas were expanded and assisted by the criticism I received at Milford conferences. It’s a daunting experience, and I do not recommend it just for any young writer. It can be destroying to hear your own work criticised. You come out of the session in which your story is being analysed into little shreds and you head for the nearest bottle of booze. After a while you do learn to be self-critical, but not self-destructive.

SFR: So do you know that your new story or new book is good?

AMC: I never do! (Shakes head emphatically; laughs.) Once I’ve got it down I think, oh, what have I said now? Oh God, it’s going to come out in print! Oh, agony, agony, agony! And then, you know, about two or three years later I reread something and I think, hey, that’s not bad. Hey, what’s coming next? Then I know I’ve done it right. But it takes that time not if gestation, but of aging, like wine. There are one or two stories I wish now I hadn’t allowed in print, but writers get pressures put on them and it’s very difficult to resist them.

SFR: Have you attended any of these writers’ meetings lately?

AMC: I haven’t been to a Milford conference since, oh, 1975 or 1976. It’s mainly been they’ve been at awkward times for me, and also the fact that I finally got a story that most of the Milford conference liked and I decided to quit then. (Laughs)

SFR: When you wrote Weyr Search, the very first dragon story, did you have any plans for a series of books?

AMC: No, no! (Shrieks in protest.) I wrote a short story about dragons, period. You know? In fact, I almost didn’t write it, because I had gotten the first 25 to 30 pages done, and then I wasn’t sure when I reread it whether it was any good at all. So I took it up to Virginia Kidd, my agent, and asked her to read it. She said, “Oh, Anne, please finish it”, so I went back to the typewriter after a lapse of about two months and finished what became Weyr Search. Now, it was an inconvenient length at 28,000 words, and John W. Campbell, the editor of Analog asked me to edit out about 8,000 words because he felt it should be in one part rather than two. Si I did edit it, but I put back in all that I had taken out when I put the novel together, so you’re not missing anything. But I had only intended that one story.

SFR: Then at what stage did you think again and continue the series?

AMC: Now, John Campbell – you can’t imagine this because you’ve got to see John Campbell with his cigarette in its holder, gesturing at you. You’ve got to get the voice and you’ve got to see crew-cut John Campbell sitting opposite you, saying (assumes deep male voice), “Now, Anne, I think you’ve got some very fertile material here. I would like to see you develop this. You set up a situation and I want to see – puff, puff – those dragonriders fighting Thread.”
So at top speed I wrote the story Dragonflight, and he said, “Anne, you haven’t told me anything I didn’t know. This is good bridging material, but it’s not telling the story.” Then I wrote Black Dust and he said (assumes Campbell voice again), “Yes, but you haven’t shown me the riders actually contending with Thread, and you haven’t solved their problem. There are only 192 dragons, in one weyr, and you say there were six weyrs. What happened to the other five?”

SFR: Were these things that you’d thought of?

AMC: No! (Shrieks; covers head with hands.) He was pointing out the weak links. So he made me write the part Dragonrider, the two-parter in Analog, and pushed me on. I think I wrote the second 20,000 words in about a week, which is the biggest output I’ve ever done. With managing three kids and a husband at the same time it was a bit much. But I did it. He published that as Dragonrider, then Betty Ballantine bought the four sections, including Dragonflight, which John had rejected, and that became the novel Dragonflight. Then Betty and John wanted me to write further about the world of Pern and I did a first draft of Dragonquest. I sent it to Virginia Kidd and she sent it back with two words: “Burn it”. I did.
And about a year or two later I settled down to re-write Dragonquest as it – well, not as it is today, because I’d gotten about 370 odd pages done and I couldn’t push it any further. Well, when that happens it’s a signal to the writer that he’s either boring himself and will bore his reader, or there’s some plot flaw that he hasn’t figured out. So New Year’s Eve in 1969, Betty Ballantine invited me up to stay with her at Bearsville. I took the manuscript and we went through it page by page. And about half way through she looked at me and she said, “You know what the problem with this story is, Anne? You’re trying to tell it from the viewpoint of F’lar and Lessa. It’s not their story. It’s F’nor and Brekke’s.” And suddenly all the problems just refocused. I knew she was right. I reworked the first couple of chapters. The rest was as it had been written.

SFR: Was this the way that the other dragon books developed – you were asked by a publisher to write some more and you had to push things along in different directions? Or did you have an overall scheme at some point?

AMC: No! (laughs) I really wish I’d had an overall scheme. I wouldn’t have made so many mistakes and inconsistencies that I now have to rationalise. But halfway through that discussion with Betty Ballantine she asked: “You can’t just leave this marvellous idea of a white dragon. You’ve got to write a book called The White Dragon.” (Originally, that was Andre Norton’s idea – she said you’ve got to have a sport, so why not make it a white dragon?) Well, I said sure. At that point I was very broke, and I knew my marriage had failed, so I signed a contract for The White Dragon, which I did not deliver for seven years! It was very kind of Ballantine. So the series was not planned as a trilogy.
Now, what happened after Dragonquest was that I was scared out of my tiny little mind about writing The White Dragon. I’d done two books which were very successful. And things sort of hung there. The in 1974 or 5 Beth Blish, who is Jim Blish and Virginia Kidd’s daughter, was talking to Jean Carle at the US Publishers, Atheneum. She said, “I wish that Anne McCaffrey would do a juvenile female protagonist in a book, aimed at the teenage market, because we have tremendous requests for this.” So Beth organised the contract and queried whether I would be interested, and I was. The genesis of that was that Roger Elwood, the mad anthologist, had asked me to do another young protagonist in a book and I had tried to work with the Menolly theme for Roger. I couldn’t push it very far, so I had written about the smallest dragonboy, and he published that. By the way, that is one of my most reprinted stories, The Smallest Dragonboy. It’s all over the world. It’s been scaled down for poor readers and for second-language readers, so it’s had a very good track record. At any rate, I went back to the Menolly material, and suddenly it started to flow, and I wrote Dragonsong and delivered it. On the way back to Ireland, on the plane, I thought, you know, I’ve got Menolly where I want her, with the master harper. So what happens to her when she gets to Harper Hall? So I wrote a letter to jean Carle saying, “Would you be interested in a contract?” and she was writing at the same time, “Anne, would you possibly consider writing a sequel to Dragonsong?” (Laughs) So, anyway, that’s the genesis of Dragonsong/singer. Then I had the chance to buy a house and I did not have enough money for the down payment, so I wrote Jean Carle and said, “Can I write a third book for you?” And she said, “Yes”. Meanwhile, the pump has been primed for The White Dragon and I’m feeling more comfortable about it. And so I wrote The White Dragon.
I wrote A Time When for Boskone in 1975, and I incorporated that material in The White Dragon, and then wrote Dragondrums.

SFR: Do you find that you enjoy writing novels for juveniles?

AMC: I’m not writing for juveniles. I’m writing less complicated novels with a fairly even plotline. I’m not talking down.

SFR: No, you’re not talking down but wouldn’t you agree that they’re more suited to a juvenile audience.

AMC: Not according to my fan mail. You know they were written for Atheneum?

SFR: My point is that I was disappointed when I read Dragonsong because I was hoping it would be the same as Dragonflight and Dragonquest. I was expecting another hard, adult novel and I was disappointed.

AMC: (Chuckles.) yeah. Well, they were definitely published as young adult books in the States.

SFR: But in Britain the publishers didn’t make that distinction. Were you annoyed at that?

AMC: No, because if you’re writing for the young adult line in England you have to scale it a lot lower, curiously enough. So Corgi themselves decided not to make the distinction and I’m just as glad.

SFR: I notice that you’re always very quick to point out that all your dragon books are science fiction rather than fantasy.

AMC: Well, they are.

SFR: How much scientific advice have you had on aspects of Pern – on things like your dragons breathing fire and Thread falling?

AMC: Hal Clement helped me with the solar system. I have since heard from an astronomer in Australia who tells me the spectro-analysis of Rukbat, the sun that I picked, proves it could not generate planets. However, when I was writing John Campbell told me, “Oh, it doesn’t matter. There’s no way they can find out.” At the time, in the 1960s, they did not have the sophisticated spectro-analysis, so it was perfectly within my rights to choose Rukbat out of the National Geographic astronomy maps as my sun, so I did. It looked like a good name. And that the dragons could be genetically developed from the fire lizards is eminently plausible, but it cannot be stated at the time Dragonflight starts. Besides, I didn’t think of it then.

SFR: Also, the bio-engineering technology has been lost by the inhabitants of Pern, so it’s not even known the dragons came about by the people who are using them.

AMC: Oh, yes, completely lost. So since I’m writing the story from the point of view of the people who are contemporary with it, I cannot do a lot of things that I want to. I went into the subterfuge of saying “Eureka! – my mycorrhizoid spores” for Thread, but mycorrhizoid spores are perfectly legitimate in Arrhenius’s theory of space travelling, which is what I used from the back of my head. Also I very definitely state that the dragons have two stomachs. In one if which they digest the phosphine-bearing rock. Well, phosphine gas, when it hits oxygen, ignites. Now okay, that’s not Larry Niven-type science, it’s soft-core science fiction.

SFR: I understand the next dragon book is going to be called Dragonlady. Where does that fit in?

AMC: Well, because so many people told me where I ought to put my next book. I have not. (Laughs/) I went back in time to something I mentioned in both Dragonflight and Dragonsinger – the Ballad of Moreta’s Ride. So I’ve gone back to the time of Moreta, which is, if my memory serves me, about 1200 years back from the 3700-AD-or-so setting of the rest of the Pern books.

SFR: Have you finished that novel?

AMC: No, I’m halfway through it.

SFR: Let’s turn to your new novel, The Crystal Singer. Briefly, can you explain the relationship between it and the four original Killashandra stories which appeared in Roger Elwood’s Continuum anthologies?

AMC: Someone once said to me that he thought Killashandra was a beautiful name for a heroine and I agreed with him. And that night, contrary to my habit, I got up out of bed and went straight to my typewriter and typed out the first two pages of Killashandra – Crystal Singer. At the same time Roger Elwood, the mad anthologist, was looking for material and this was a fairly explicit sex relationship which Virginia didn’t think Roger would stand for, but he did. And he wanted four parts for the Continuum series. Si I delivered the four different stories, the fourth of which got literally stomped on at a Milford conference. Certain ideas were suggested to me at that point by Jim Blish and John Brunner which I did not take up – mainly because I don’t have the scientific background. But since then I’ve found a gentleman in England, who works with aerospace, who has been kind enough to fill in what I needed to make it scientifically sound. Also, certain characters developed that I hadn’t expected. For instance, Lanzecki, who developed into a much stronger character in Killashandra’s life. The Crystal Singer as it is at the moment, from Severn House, is the first two stories, or rather the first and the third stories as they got printed, greatly expanded. I hope to do a second novel. There will not be a trilogy. I’m sick to death of trilogies. You can push material only so far before it begins to get very thin, and I can see two novels in the Crystal Singer idea but no more than that.

SFR: And you haven’t written that second novel yet?

AMC: No, because I’m busy writing Dragonlady.

SFR: When I read the Killashandra stories I noticed a very strong Irish flavour to them – the name, the characters and so on. Was this conscious at the time you were writing?

AMC: (Laughs.) It was, because I’m always looking around for character names and I’ve learned to keep long lists of typos and odd place names. At that point in time I was very deeply into Ireland and I was surrounded by all these marvellous alien names like Ballybran and Ballybrach and Shankill and Shanganagh and all the rest. They seemed easy to use. After all, people with certain ethnic backgrounds are going to name alien planets after things that are familiar to them, simply to give themselves a feeling of home. Si the Irish background is there.

AMC: Well, that came about because Sonya Dorman and I were visiting each other at the time and she had written a story she wanted me to read. She said she didn’t know whether it was sword-and-sorcery or fantasy. I said, “It isn’t sword-and-sorcery or fantasy, it’s alchemy and academe”. And she said, “Hey, that would be a great title for an anthology.” I said, “Good. Let’s try and find somebody who’ll do it and I’ll write a story for it too.” Well, I never wrote a story for it, but I ended up compiling the stories that were in it. It was a good anthology in 1970 and it still is.

SFR: Because, of course, it was reprinted only a year or two back. Have you any plans to edit more story anthologies?

AMC: No. (Laughs.) I’m not very good as a compiler or an editor. I recognise my own limitations.

SFR: I know that a lot of people, including my wife, would very much like to get hold of a copy of Cooking Out of this World, your very entertaining anthology of recipes suggested by science fiction authors. Are there any plans to reprint it?

AMC: Actually there are. Ballantine was going to reprint it with pictures of dragons here and there, and I thought that was a cheat, so that has since been dropped from the plans of Ballantine. Hank Stine of Starblaze has said he’d be interested in publishing an updated Cooking Out of this World and if his bindings improve I’ll do it.

SFR: How about your three non-science fiction novels? How did they come about?

AMC: I’ve always been interested in romantic fiction, as I said. In fact, Restoree, let’s face it, is a space gothic, in which I take all the elements of a good, swashbuckling space adventure except I have the heroine with all the answers rather than the hero, which I thought was a nice change. People realised I was having them on. Now, in the sixties, when the gothics were very popular, I was asked by Dell to do one and I signed and did one, Mark of Merlin, which I’d actually written the first four or five chapters of to satisfy the composition requirements of a course I was taking at Harvard. And I’d put it aside. Many years later I took it out again, shook it, blew the dust of, reworked it and it became Mark of Merlin. And then I signed a three book contract with Dell, of which The Kilternan Legacy and Ring of Fear were two. But then Dell ceased to correspond with me and I had no editorial feedback, and that was it. I’ve got five romantic novels sitting half finished and no market for them.

SFR: Id have thought that publishers would want to publish you whatever the book was, including romances because of your name being well known.

AMC: The name helps, but there are fads in publishing, and at the moment the gothic isn’t one of them. So I’ll just wait.

SFR: Out of all your books – novels, collections and anthologies – what is your personal favourite?

AMC: The Ship Who Sang.

SFR: Have you ever been tempted to go back and write another story?

AMC: No, because The Ship Who Sang was sort of my escape valve for a lot of tensions that were in my life that decade, let’s say. Thos pressures have since been released or become non-existent. You can’t somehow return to a scene like that as easily as you think you can, so I have avoided going back to the Helva setting. Helva is not a voice I feel I need to speak with at the moment, thank God, but who knows? Anyway, you can stretch a theme too far. It becomes too fragile and falls apart. So it’s better to push yourself away from the table while you are still a bit hungry.

SFR: I mustn’t make you late for your flight back to Ireland. Thanks very much, Anne McCaffrey, for agreeing to be interviewed.

**end**

__________________Hans, also known as Elrhan, Master Archivist

Visit The Pern Museum & Archives for all your Pern and Anne McCaffrey News and Resources!
The Pern Museum & Archives is the home of the Pern Encyclopedia and the Pern Bloodlines.

Hans, I have never seen this interview before...and I am so thrilled to get to read all of it now. This was the best interview I have ever gotten to read. Thank you so very much for sharing this with all of us.
I also just recently ran across another interview on "Cresent Blues" that is also a very good one, it has a lot about the old Zyntopo with Alliance/Alantis T.V. deal that we all know fell through....drat!!!

Becky ask me if I would share where this interview was.... So here hopefully is a link to the interview...or at least the address to where it can be found.

__________________
"To the Horsehead Nebula and back we shall make beautiful music"..."Together!"

The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression,and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cut out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived........Howard Pyle

Thanks for adding the link, Maelin! I'm sure there are lots of folks who will enjoy reading it. I'd read it before but it was very nice to refresh and read it again. Even tho we didn't get the tv show.

I've always found that story very interesting. It packs a lot into a couple of pages, that's for sure. Did she say why she wished it had never been printed? But then she reprints it in an anthology (Wondrous Beginnings) just a few years ago.

Becky, I never dared ask her outright but I got the impression that it was simply because it was her first 'attempt' of which she thought the general quality (and maybe the basic idea?) wasn't that good where

I know several peeps were surprised wthat she gave permission for a reprint in "Wondrous Beginnings".

Like you I don't think it's a bad story. You do have to remember it was written in the early fifties and that SF fans and people in general later laughed when they read about Martians and their exploits. Having explored Mars for real sort of renoved the mythical quality, if you get wat I mean?

__________________Hans, also known as Elrhan, Master Archivist

Visit The Pern Museum & Archives for all your Pern and Anne McCaffrey News and Resources!
The Pern Museum & Archives is the home of the Pern Encyclopedia and the Pern Bloodlines.

Wow, thanks for typing all that out for us! That was a good in-depth interview. It really shows that pretty much none of her series were planned as such. Either she was asked to continue a series, or needing to get something else in print to pay the bills she went back to a story and expanded upon it.

I loved the Freedom of the race too... that is one of the stories that I ask Anne to sign for me last year when we got to meet her...she signed it to me in Lavender sparkle ink, it's one of my most favorite signatures of hers. I love the cover of that magazine, it has always reminded me of Helva!!!

__________________
"To the Horsehead Nebula and back we shall make beautiful music"..."Together!"

The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression,and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cut out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived........Howard Pyle

Anne certainly didn't like the story, now that I think on it. I supplied her with a copy of the story for the reprint in Wondrous Beginnings! She didn't even keep a copy of the magazine or the original story for herself.

__________________
"To the Horsehead Nebula and back we shall make beautiful music"..."Together!"

The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression,and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cut out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived........Howard Pyle

Wowee, what a treat! Thanks Hans! One thing that confused me though is the time setting she put for the 9th Pass, 3700 AD. With 2500 years of Pern history, wouldn't that mean they landed there 807 years ago?

__________________
"To the Horsehead Nebula and back we shall make beautiful music"..."Together!"

The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression,and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cut out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived........Howard Pyle

Wowee, what a treat! Thanks Hans! One thing that confused me though is the time setting she put for the 9th Pass, 3700 AD. With 2500 years of Pern history, wouldn't that mean they landed there 807 years ago?

I think Anne meant 3700 years after landing on Pern, and not in reference to our time. Even then of course it's wrong, but as Hans said she was trying to grab a number from memory.

Hans, that was great, just the right night cap for I don't drink, LOL for me! It reminds me of An Address by Anne McCaffrey, it was tapedat the one of the cons here is the US just after Anne had hand over Dragonsdrums to her publisher 197* someting I would have to check and get back to you all on the date, I ejoy it very much.

I must have gone over most of what Anne had written up till I could find any more from her at that time in tech school, LOL

__________________Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, wine in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO what a ride!"

OOoooOO Cheryl...thats one of the first early signs of growing old, especially when this interview was so memorable........

__________________
"To the Horsehead Nebula and back we shall make beautiful music"..."Together!"

The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression,and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cut out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived........Howard Pyle